by Clay Fisher
Or maybe even preposterous!
His Shoshone knife slipped into the yielding belly just under the prosternum, slid downward with no sound to the genitals. The smoking viscera spilled outward, and he caught and severed the stomach from its esophageal and intestinal ties. As skillfully, he trimmed it of its clinging pieces of interorgan fat and heavier adherences of muscle, slit it down its ventral surface, and emptied its vegetable content on the floor.
Moving quickly with it toward Crow Girl, he asked, “Have I done with it as you said?” She smiled that he had, and he went on. “And it is now to be placed around the knee so that the inside of the uncleaned paunch comes to bear directly upon the wound itself?” Again she smiled, adding, “Aye, and fastened firmly there so that the natural juices may feel their way into the wound, drawing out the poisons that Sayapi’s bullet left within.”
Kelly knelt beside her, capping the purulent knee with the still-steaming paunch of the young elk, binding its greasy casing securely in place with salvagings from the old cotton strips.
“No,” remonstrated Crow Girl, as he finished tying off his dressing wraps and reached for the splints, “do not replace the willow sticks. I will not move the leg, awake or asleep. In three days the bad smell and the yellow sickness will be gone. It is but one of the secrets of my people. You will see.”
Kelly returned her sober look, nodding thoughtfully.
“Perhaps I shall. I have already seen quite a few of the ‘secrets’ of your people in but two days. What might I not see in three?”
The blizzard came first.
It blew crazily from every quarter of the mountain compass for forty-eight unbroken hours, then crashed to a wind-still halt as suddenly as it had begun.
The sun shone brilliantly that third morning. From earliest light, it poured down on a new mountain world of snow white, timber green, and startling, winter-sky blue. By ten o’clock it was warm enough to unpin and throw aside the thawing green elk hide Kelly had improvised into an emergency storm door. The fragrant pine– and cedar-distilled wine of the mountainside air flowed into the windowless cabin, washing out the staleness of two days and three nights of cooking and living odors and carrying away the decomposing offense of the elk paunch still bound to Crow Girl’s knee As it did, Kelly came once more to stand over her and to look down at what he did not want to see.
But the clean morning light fell revealingly about his small patient, narrowing Kelly’s dark eyes sharply.
She was still asleep, but her breathing was deep and easy now, no longer shallow and labored as it had been. Her face was neither flushed brick red nor paled fish-belly gray, the way it had been alternating since her return. Dropping beside her, he touched her forehead. Cool. Almost cold. As heatless, indeed, as April runoff water. He took her wrist. The pulse was slow, steady, strong.
My God! Could that miserable elk gut possibly have passed her through the crisis? Broken the fever? Beaten the gangrene? Actually drawn the pus and poison from that terrible wound? Literally have saved her slender leg and savage life?
No, impossible.
This was coma; that last merciful unconsciousness from which the traveler to that distant bourn of no return never recovers. His nose told him that, even as his heart leapt with unaccountable hope over the prior prospect. The stench from that cursed knee was worse than ever. Here, so close to her, its moribund nausea was unmistakable. The fever was gone too late, the pulse not slowed in time. Those strangely beautiful and disturbing gray eyes would never open again. Crow Girl was dying.
Then, even as the dread diagnosis formed in Kelly’s tired mind, the blankets beneath his big hand stirred suddenly.
Crow Girl moved her dusky black-lashed lids, sighed happily, opened those same strangely beautiful and disturbing gray eyes that were never going to open again, and sat up, yawning luxuriously.
20
It was Kelly’s nose, really, which had betrayed him.
What he had smelled was the elk paunch, turned very high from its sixty hours in the heated air of the snow-sealed cabin. But Luther S. Kelly was a hardhead.
When Crow Girl had fully enjoyed her awakening yawn and told him as much, he would not believe her. It was not until he had removed the paunch at her order and subsequently thrown it as far out across the meadow as he could, then sponged off its adhering residue from about the wound site, that he was made an open-mouthed convert.
Call it heathen witchcraft or no, that wound was as clean as the cross grain of a fresh-cut buffalo steak. The angry purulence was drawn entirely from it, it was already beginning to close and heal, the slim leg above and below it had returned to its normal size and perfect shape.
From that hour, Crow Girl’s recovery was as swift as that of any vital young animal. Her inherent Indian urge to live healed her with a speed which bewildered Kelly and which had her limping about the cabin without her crutch-stick in the first week. By the second week, when he gingerly removed the boiled cotton bandage which was all she had permitted him to use, the wound was closed. By the third week, the girl was actually hinging the knee and, save for a slight limp which she would in all likelihood carry for life, might never have been struck by Sayapi’s cruel bullet.
Now began the happiest time of Luther Kelly’s life: the hidden winter months which frontier legend insistently whispers he spent with the young Absaroka woman, H’tayetu Hopa, Beautiful Evening, in the tiny cabin at Crow Girl Meadow high on the sheltered south flank of Judith Mountain.
The first of the countless many wonderful days was the one beginning the third week of his small patient’s remarkable convalescence.
By this time it was abundantly clear to Kelly that his guess as to both Gall and Sayapi having returned to the Musselshell for reinforcements had been correct. Not a Sioux moccasin print nor a Throat Slitter pony track had appeared to mar the virgin snows of the cedar ridges above Judith Basin. Furthermore, the first blizzard had been succeeded by two others, lesser in force but heavy with new snow and guaranteeing the closure of the only two trails into the Cedar Ridge foothills buttressing the white scout’s skillfully chosen campsite. Barring a January or February warm-wind chinook, always an uneasy possibility in high Montana, he and his gray-eyed Indian miss were snowed in until the late spring breakup took the ice out of the lower rivers, to begin draining the mountain snowpack above.
The prospect of the chinook did not worry him unduly.
These “silver thaws,” thought to be occasioned by freakish west winds blowing across the Washington Cascades from the heated offshore Pacific Ocean current coming down past the Alaskan Peninsula, were far from every-winter occurrences. And, even if one should hit them, he and the girl could run ahead of it faster than Gall and Sayapi could come in behind it. Ponies or no ponies, their snug meadow was only a long one-night foot trek to Reed’s Ranch, where it was a three-day forcing horseback lope from the Hunkpapa main camp on the Musselshell.
So it was that Kelly’s iron conscience was at rest, his immature adventurer’s heart soaring high that remembered Monday morning of the third week.
And why not?
Ahead of him he could see nothing but the engrossing snowbound prospect of refuting Dr. Johnson’s dismal observation that “life offers more to be endured than to be enjoyed.” And he had meanwhile undertaken preparations to meet the pleasant emergency.
He had made himself a trim set of Sioux snowshoes against the time when the last of the young bull elk would have been eaten, necessitating a fresh kill. He had also made, against the first moment she would be well enough to ride upon it, an exquisite little cedar and willow-bark toboggan for Crow Girl. The present crystal bright morning was the conjunctive time for both events. The smell of snow and pine and pure mountain ozone was overpowering. Before he had gone a hundred yards, Kelly was whistling and grinning and picking up to a frisky trot, as happy as though he had good sense.
Behind him his tiny passenger, bundled to her dimpled chin in Sayapi’s gorgeous red Four Point blanket, laughed joyously and chattered as incessantly as a small child.
Finally, Kelly had to chide her into silence.
They really did need meat, he told her, and if she was going to carry on like a magpie the entire morning long, they would have nothing for their supper save the few marrowbones and scraps of hock gristle left of the elk. She subsided looking a little hurt but clearly understanding the requisite niceties of the stalk. A short time later, he cut fresh mountain sheep sign and, after but a ten-minute follow, dropped a fat yearling ewe out of a band which was just moving down from the higher peaks and had, accordingly, not been shot over since the past fall, if then.
He hung and gutted the young sheep quickly, wanting to get her hocks slit and her carcass slung for handy backpacking before it froze. He had just completed the latter task—forcing the front feet through the twin slits made between bone and tendon of the hocks to lock the front and rear legs together like those of a range calf roped and thrown for burning—when Crow Girl’s soft voice startled him from the top of the twelve-foot cutbank overhanging the gully in which he had dropped the ewe.
“I think you had better tie me up like that too, Lone Wolf!” laughed the panting Indian girl. “I don’t think I can walk back to the little sled now. I am so weak from following you—”
As she said it, and before he could think to warn her back, she had started down the treacherous bank. On her second step, the weakened knee gave way, and she fell headlong toward the broken-edged boulders littering the gully’s bed.
Somehow Kelly got over the sprawling carcass of the sheep and under the cutbank before Crow Girl’s plummeting body struck among the waiting boulders. It was thus her slender frame met not the jarring shock of thinly snow-clad granite but the muscular cushion of elk skin–covered arms.
She had not cried out at either the onset or termination of her fall, as would have a white girl. Now she lay quietly, both slim arms encircling her rescuer’s neck, her soft form passive in his cradled grasp. Kelly stood there, not able to open either his mouth or his arms. A most peculiar feeling of weakness began to take him behind the knees. At the moment of its inception, Crow Girl chose to peek upward at his stern face from beneath a properly shy downcasting of sooty black eyelashes. She blushed daintily, sighed inaudibly, snuggled her dark head the least bit closer against his broad chest. His arms tightened instinctively, his pulse leapt, his heart hammered against his ribs as though it would beat its way out of their trapping cage by main wild force. Crow Girl laughed aloud, squirmed her young body deliberately against his. She slid her silky cheek along his cording jaw, found and brushed his ear with open lips, bit him suddenly and savagely on the neck.
He straightened up as though someone had slapped him in the haunch with a hot marking iron. He did not put Crow Girl down reprovingly, nor set her upon her feet primly. He dropped her. Right squarely on her shapely rear. And he did it not as a directed act of conscious moral volition but as a matter of involuntary muscle flection.
Kelly was not shocked, he was stampeded.
To begin with he had never in his life held a young girl in his arms. Much less had one teasingly move her body against his. Or bite him libidinously below the ear. Not to mention laughing wickedly about the whole thing while she was maliciously about it.
Furthermore, he had been all his active masculine life too interested in the adventures of the male animal to even think about the machinations of the enemy sex.
Right from the age most boys are starting to notice the nubbining-up of Sister Sue or the bottom-rounding of Cousin Clara Mae, or devoting their extra classroom hours to boring strategic knotholes in the schoolhouse privy’s unpainted partition, young Luther Kelly had been a man’s boy concerned only with the world of men.
In another day and time, he would have been a Knight Templar or Crusader of the Malta Cross, a captain under Cromwell, a cutlassed leader of a John Paul Jones boarding crew, one of Lafitte’s volunteers at New Orleans, a voyageur for Jacob Astor or Pierre Chouteau, a disciple-at-buckskin-knee of Bit Throat Bridger or Broken Hand Fitzpatrick, or an unpaid Ranger under history-tall Sam Houston in his dream of Texas Empire.
But when his own minute struck, the hour was too late. Even the War Between the States, that wholesale maker of heroes, was nearly over. He had had to lie three years onto his age (using the common dodge of the time to mark a number “eighteen” on the bottoms of his shoes so that he could tell the recruiting corporal that he was “over eighteen”) just so he would not miss the opportunity entirely. And then for his trouble had drawn six miserable months of barracks tour north of the Potomac! The only fighting he saw was among his drunken or quarters-fevered messmates of Company G on payday.
When his three-year hitch was at last up, only one frontier to explore, only one final land to conquer, lay open to the dreamer of crusaders, kingmakers, robber barons, buccaneers, fur traders, mountain men, and builders of Lone Star Empires in the clouds—the West!
A frontiersman, a real frontiersman, the puritan high plainsman, the one cast in the mystery of silent space, endless sky, and shining mountain-mold of a Jedediah Smith or a Father De Smet, was never a squaw man. That was for the Bridgers and the Bents and all the rest of the commercial buckskin brigade. The true believer was a loner like Luther Kelly. He might be a doer of incredible deeds but he was above all a dreamer of impossible dreams: a spellbound sitter on the sides of magnificent mountains; an awed looker-out over limitless rolling buffalo pastures, never-ending sunlit stands of pine and cedar, rushing falls and long-still pools of boulder-broken glass-green water; and a drinker-in of all the wild restless wine, borne hauntingly upon the western wind, of what might lie beyond the last far shining range, cloud-capped and softly calling across the lonely miles.
Kelly, in his years along the Yellowstone, had become such a mountain sitter and such a seer of far ranges.
Accordingly, he had become the legend that he already was in 1875. With his matchless knowledge of a land long closed to all white men but himself, he had become a sort of “all things to all men” who might stand in need of his wilderness advice or services. By the same lonely token, his life had been without feminine contact. To women, even to the dusky Mandan, Sioux, Cheyenne, and Gros Ventres maidens who had tested his moral immunity in the course of unavoidable trading post or Indian village social contacts, he had been as nothing, as they and all other women had been as nothing to him.
It had been a comfortable and vastly safe arrangement of woman-shy male security.
Now, suddenly, it was in the gravest danger.
Kelly, for all his innocence, sensed that instinctively as his hand now went unthinkingly to the whitening marks of Crow Girl’s clean teeth upon his bronzed neck.
Scowling defensively, he stepped back from where she still sat gazing up at him in wide-eyed astonishment at having been so rudely deposited upon her pretty backside. On the point of returning his angry look, the Indian girl found herself bubblingly unable to oblige. Instead, she laughed again, the childish, ringing bell clarity of the happy sound only serving to darken Kelly’s black Irish scowl. He turned away from her, went quickly to the side of his kill, tested one of the quarters already beginning to “set up” in the sunless chill of the gully bottom, wheeled growlingly on the innocent-eyed Crow Girl.
“Get up!” he snapped at her. “We must go back now. It is too cold here. The ewe’s body is beginning to stiffen up. Hopo!”
“Give me your hand,” she requested demurely, holding up her own slender red fingers for him to take
He obliged ungallantly, pulling her to her feet, still angry with her and with himself.
“Lone Wolf,” she said softly.
He had already turned away to pick up the trussed ewe. “What is it now?” he grumped testily, trying the “hold” of the sheep’s inserted
forefeet in the rear-quarter hock slits to be sure of his “packing lock” before slinging the game across his shoulder. “Be quick with it,” he repeated. “This cursed cold will have this ewe’s body stiff as a Sioux cradleboard in another minute.”
Crow Girl nodded obediently, but caught his eyes with a look that put his nape hairs on end.
“A small moment ago,” she murmured, with an inflection of throaty meaning no man could miss, “when you held me so strong and so close and when I twisted myself against you, I felt your body stiffen. Was that also the cold, Lone Wolf—?”
21
The cedar fire snapped amiably and talked garrulously back at Kelly as he fed it up preparatory to laying it over with some seasoned gnarls of deadfall pine to make a bed of broiling coals for the sheep’s ribs he planned for their supper. The long day since their return from the hunt had gone well. Crow Girl had put in the entire afternoon working down and fleshing out the green hide of the bighorn ewe for later tanning. Now she had just gone out to carry away the meat and fat scraps of her labor, and Kelly, waiting for the resinous cedar to slow its crackling discourse and die back a bit, looked around the little cabin and found life good again.
